


the end of all things

by starlight_sugar



Category: Campaign: Skyjacks (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-10-01 04:14:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17237222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlight_sugar/pseuds/starlight_sugar
Summary: “Nobody has ever researched limbo before.” (An Inception AU.)





	the end of all things

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of the AUcember series, a self-made challenge where I try to write a new AU one-shot every day. You can read all of the AUcember fics in the collection linked above.

The air is cold, cold enough that it bites against Travis’s skin as he walks forward. It doesn’t feel like air conditioning, just like January. Like normal January inside this normal suburban house that Travis has never been in before. Everything is rotting or rotten, and he doesn’t want to breathe it in any more than he has to.

His footsteps are louder than they have any right to be, echoing dully against the walls. The hallway is carpeted, but the carpet is rotten and worn away to reveal the wood underneath, and his feet slap down on the wood. The brown paint is peeling off the walls in the hallway, and it’s covered with picture frames. Most of them are too cracked to see anything, and Travis gets as far as lifting his palm to brush off the dust before he decides against it. Some things are meant to be private.

Travis holds his breath until he turns the corner, into a living room, when he lets out an exhale. He can see his breath puffing in front of him as he walks in. There’s a horrible purple couch in one corner, with a stain on it that he doesn’t understand, doesn’t want to ask about. There’s a table filled with beakers, all mismatched glass, some of them chipped. There’s a PASIV machine, an old one, sitting in the corner.

He reaches out to trail his finger across the wallpaper as he walks through the room. It’s not a room he knows, but he knows everything in it. It’s what they keep in their warehouse, in what they all call Dref’s corner. It’s not comfortable or cozy, but they can never drag him out of it.

The wall above the couch is covered in pictures, these ones with clear, new frames. Travis stops to examine them. There are pictures of Jonnit, sitting on the high wall outside the warehouse that they use, of him in the dreamscape trying to build paradoxes. There are pictures of Gable, poring over blueprints, a rare moment of them smiling with abandon at something not in the frame.

There are pictures of Travis, too. He doesn’t spend much time looking at those.

He steps from the living room to the kitchen, and nearly gasps at the shock of warmth. It’s not January, it’s June, and it’s almost overwhelming. He has to grab the door frame to keep steady, and his fingertips peek around the edge to the living room, still freezing. He sways on the spot, drawn to the warmth, trying to adjust.

It takes him a second to look around the kitchen enough to register anything he’s seeing. The kitchen is clearly barebones, not something that anyone lives in. It’s hard to see the table through all of the piles and piles of notebooks, most of them with pages sticking out the ends. He hears Dref before he sees him: the scratch of the pen on the paper, the murmurs as he talks to himself. It’s not words so much as sounds, but Travis knows the rhythm of it. An idea, a rejection. A revelation, an adjustment. It’s so familiar it hurts.

Travis takes a cautious step forward. “Dref.”

“Busy,” Dref says, and if this were the warehouse, Travis would leave. If this were the warehouse, Travis would walk away and come back the next time he got bored.

But Travis isn’t bored. And this isn’t the warehouse.

“It’s urgent,” he says, and reaches out to touch the top of the book closest to him. “Can I sit?”

“Where would you like to sit?”

“Do you have another chair?”

The words are barely out of Travis’s mouth when a chair pops into existence, just beside him. at the perfect height for him. One of the stacks of books disappears when he blinks, and then another. They reform, loose pages and dog-ears and all, directly next to the table.

And there’s Dref. He looks older, but not unhappier for it. Just as skinny as ever, but his hair is longer, curling around his ears, the back of his neck. He’s not wearing his glasses. There are ink blots on his hands, dotting his fingertips and palm and wrists. It’s the Dref that Travis knows, and it’s a Dref that Travis has never seen before.

Travis takes a seat. “You’ve been here a while.”

“I’ve had time to master the mechanics of the dream.”

“You don’t stutter here.”

Dref doesn’t look self-conscious in the least. “If this is my dream, I can speak as quickly as you do.”

“It’s not your dream.”

“I know that.”

“But you’re staying.”

“I have research to do.”

Travis looks at the piles of books. “How long?”

“I’ll stay as long as is healthy.”

“No, Dref, how long have you been here?”

Dref pauses, long enough that something ugly curls in Travis’s stomach. “Years,” he says, and Travis decides not to ask for a number. “Not long enough.”

“You haven’t been in limbo long enough? Long enough for what?”

“Nobody has ever researched limbo before.”

“You can’t take the books with you when you leave.”

“They’ll be here for the next person.”

“Is that how limbo works? You can’t be sure.”

“I’m researching,” Dref says, clearly irritated. “It’s my job to be sure. It’s my job to stay until I’m sure.”

“Who gave you this job?”

“Nobody had to give it to me. It is my duty, this is what I do-”

“What you do is research the PASIV.” Travis leans forward, putting his hand on the edge of the table. “What you do is make sure that nobody else at Uhuru dies, including me. What you do is important out there.”

“What I do in here is important out there,” Dref says, with no small amount of acid. “I’m making-”

Travis scoffs. “Don’t say you’re making a difference.”

Dref leans back, looking stung. “How can you say that?”

“Because this is nothing. You’ve made your childhood home and you’ve put in your new life, and none of it is going to make it out. What’s the point of research that nobody will see?”

“I’ll know it,” Dref says decisively. It’s almost chilling, how certain he sounds about staying in limbo forever. “I will be here if someone else finds me.”

“Nobody else has found you.”

“You found me.”

Travis pauses. He was hoping to avoid this part, but with desperate times… “Do you remember why you’re here, Dref?”

“I’m here to-”

“Not why you’re in limbo, why you’re in the dream.”

Dref frowns. His eyebrows furrow. The temperature rises, just barely enough that Travis can feel it. “I’m here because… because… I came here.”

“Not willingly,” Travis says. “We woke up and you were gone.”

“That can’t be it,” Dref says, but that stunning certainty is gone now. Without that bravado, Dref seems smaller. “That- why?”

“We think that people were trying to get to Uhuru through you.”

“Do they know about Orimar?”

“Hard to say,” Travis lies. They know about Orimar, who came back from limbo wrong. They know that Dref fixed him, even temporarily, and they don’t want Orimar to be fixed. This isn’t a threat or a message, it’s an attack. “I had to use the same PASIV to get to you.”

“How long has it been?”

“An hour. Maybe two.”

“Two hours?” Dref repeats, startled. “You found me in two hours?”

“We need our chemist,” Travis says, like it’s nothing.

(It’s not nothing. Travis had been in a dream with Gable and Jonnit, trying to figure out something to do about what happened to Orimar, trying to find a more permanent fix. And then music had started playing. Travis doesn’t know the song, doesn’t know what happened, but he knows that Dref was trying to send them something. So he had Gable wake him up, and Dref was gone. There was a journal lying open on the floor, and that was when he knew something was wrong. It’d been a simple mission, other than how grim the three of them had been the whole time. Uhuru without Dref meant Uhuru without Orimar, and that would be dangerous.)

“I don’t-” Dref swallows. He looks pale now, and Travis is a little viciously glad for it. It looks right, to have him looking like this. A little more like he looks outside limbo. “I was sent here?”

“You were.”

“How did you find me?”

“Used their PASIV.”

“You know how?”

“I watched you,” Travis says, surprised. Dref has explained the ins and outs of the PASIV to everyone at Uhuru who uses it, just so they have a rudimentary knowledge. He supposes it shouldn’t be a surprise that most of them don’t retain any of that explanation. But he doesn’t want to put his life in the hands of a machine that he doesn’t understand, so he made sure that he understands it.

Dref is staring at him. Travis stares back. “You have to come back with me.”

“Uhuru can survive-

“Uhuru needs you.”

“Why are you so determined to bring me back?”

Travis blinks. He hadn’t expected this. It’d never occurred to him that Dref might want to stay in limbo. “You can stay if you want, but I think you’re wrong for doing it.”

Dref’s eyes flash. “And why am I wrong?”

“I don’t suppose it would matter if I said there are people relying on you?”

“People are relying on my research.”

“Jonnit and Gable and I are relying on you,” Travis says. He’s surprised to hear himself say it, but Dref’s fingers twitch, so he has to assume he’s doing something right. “That’s why we’re in the living room, isn’t it? It’s set up like Uhuru’s warehouse because that’s your home. We’re there because we’re your team, we’re your people.”

“I don’t-” Dref swallows. “T-T-Travis, I think-”

“There you are,” Travis says, without thinking. Now isn’t the time for thinking, because none of his thought-out arguments are working. Dref is too rational, too measured for that, so he has to resort to the territory neither of them are familiar with: raw emotion. “Jonnit and Gable are waiting for us, out in the real world.”

“What are th-they doing?”

“Trying to make sure that we can get out safely.”

“Is Uhuru safe?”

“We left it safe,” Travis says, which isn’t the same thing. Dref knows it, too, but they don’t have time to worry about their people. Travis doesn’t give a damn about the rest of Uhuru right now. “I’m not going to let anyone else there put me under, Dref, you know that.”

“One day you’ll work with another ch-ch-chemist,” Dref says, but he doesn’t sound like he means it. He’s looking at Travis with an emotion that Travis can’t read, can’t even begin to parse. Normally he can read people, but Dref is hard to understand. “It won’t be an easy adjustment.”

“Leaving limbo? I’ve been in here fifteen seconds, maybe.”

“I meant for me.”

Travis waves a hand. “You’ve been here two hours, at the absolute most. You know more about this than anyone else. You’ll know how to stop yourself from going out of your mind.”

Dref looks at Travis, even and inscrutable. The kitchen is warm, so warm that Travis can feel sweat gathering under the collar of his shirt. The pen is still in Dref’s hands, gripped tight between two fingers, but he’s not looking at it. He’s looking at Travis.

“Come with me,” Travis says.

The stacks of books vanish without so much as a pop. The pen is gone from Dref’s hand, and the ink stains are fading. He looks soft and surreal around the edges, but he looks sure. Completely self assured. The kitchen doesn’t feel like June anymore. It feels like the end of March, like it would be perfect with just a light breeze. There’s sunlight in the room. Travis hadn’t even realized how dark it was.

Dref says, quietly, “Okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr and Twitter @waveridden!


End file.
